GamesIndustry.biz: You're running an MMO without a subscription fee, and using an episodic content model instead - but it seems that basically, you're accepting less revenue for providing an MMO service than other firms are, since many of them release paid-for expansion packs as well as charging a monthly fee. How do you justify that, economically?

Jeff Strain: First of all, it costs us far less to operate Guild Wars than a traditional MMO. The technology team behind our server technology is the team that built the original Battle.net. At that time, there was no broadband, so the whole thing was built around 28.8 modem assumptions - so we learned a tremendous amount about latency masking and bandwidth optimisation. When we built the core network technology behind Arena.net, of which Guild Wars is one game that uses that technology, it was really designed with those principles in mind. Even though we knew that broadband was growing and that most people would have it, we wanted to make a game that was very bandwidth-light, because we knew from the beginning that we were not going to charge a subscription fee, and that - bandwidth - is one of your primary operating costs. Obviously you pay for the server infrastructure up front, but your ongoing cost is bandwidth, and we use substantially less bandwidth than almost any online game out there. So, right up front, we've cut our support cost that way.